Eusebia
by DownWithBananafish
Summary: "He has never been one of those vying for a chance at something he could never have." Patroklos or Patroclus (this spelling thing is really getting on my nerves) hovers in the Fields of Asphodel, wondering if his sacrifice was worth the life that led up to it.


Hektor's spear shattering his breastbone. Caught, stumbling, between this world and whatever lay beyond it, darkness blooming against his bare skin, the defender of Troy standing over him, spear in hand. "Is that what the son of Peleus said to you, fool," says Hektor, and he knows it's not a question. This is a taunt, he realizes, and he can barely think around the pain, the terrible mind-numbing pain, burning up his insides and making the world spin faster, faster, faster . . . he can feel himself slipping away, knows he will not live much longer, but if there's one thing Achilles has taught him it's that you can't let your enemies get to you. _I'm dying_, he thinks, and a heady rush of adremaline floods his body. _I am invincible._

He rises to Hektor's last challenge and thinks, detatched and only dimly conscious, of what Achilles will say when he hears of this.

Floating, feeling lost—shades and spirits are everywhere here, in this perpetual grayness. Far off, he can see a faint glimmer that he knows is what they call Elysium, but he doesn't belong there, he knows. His soul is neither black nor white, hero nor villain. He is lost without a guide here, floating, lost, always lost, through a haze of in-between, souls that have done neither good nor evil, who lived and died with no songs or stories in their wake.

He finds he misses the brightness of heroes.

After minutes, hours, days, years, a lifetime of hovering in the Fields of Asphodel, he begins to dream.

Slow, hazy things at first—images, really, filmy and fleeting and gone before he could get a proper look. Hektor staring down at his corpse with an expression of—pity? Revulsion?—in his eyes. The fight for the body, blood and flesh and fury and death, everywhere, always. Only the dead have seen the end of the war, he thinks, and only now does he see the fallacy in this: he is dead, and the war goes on. War and death stop for no man, and he will never see the end of it, of this senseless lie that keeps men fighting and killing and dying like toy soldiers in the hands of a bored, petty child.

He once thought that that child was Achilles, and then, on a larger scale, the gods. Now he knows that we all play children to each other's toy soldiers, and that (with a quiet swell of pride) not many of us know how to be soldiers, how to play other people's games and play them well. He has never been one of those vying for a chance at something he could never have—he made a life out of serving children. He knows how to give up when forgiveness is needed.

The images come, and go: he sees them bringing his corpse back to the Greek camp, held high like a trophy rather than the mangled remains of a person. He sees Achilles' face go slack, mouth opened wide in a scream unlike any sound he has heard before, dropping to his knees, rubbing his face in the dust. Patroklos, shrieks the hero, as Atomedon grabs his hands that scrabble like things possessed for the knife hidden in the folds of his tunic. _Patroklos_. The whole damn world will hear his name. Everyone will know, everyone will see. _Patroklos_, son of Menoitios, companion of Achilles, best of the Myrmidons. Left this world, leaving a mark that no one will understand. Just another toy soldier in the hands of someone bigger, angrier, more powerful. _Patroklos_.

Later, Briseis comes. She sees the corpse, and he thinks that she, perhaps, will understand: she is, after all, a prisoner like he was, all those eternities ago. Surely she knows something of toy soldiers.

She weeps anyway, silently, her perfect face twisted and blotchy, her elegant figure bent harshly over his body in grief. Patroklos, she says, and (for that moment at least) she is a child like the rest of them.

But she speaks for him when the women of the camp gather to lament, and he is struck, not for the first time, by the power with which the dead can sway the living.

The dreams become longer, more vivid. He watches Achilles slaughter a dozen Trojan prisoners, in his name, their blood staining his ashes, the great hero's face taut and hard and _desperate_. In life he would have been sickened; in death he is reached by few emotions, but he does know this: innocent blood may be Achilles' solution to every problem, but no one's life is worth this. More toy soldiers gone will not bring the shattered ones back.

He sees his father, old Menoitios, staring into space, the news working its way past his clouded eyes, the distance that comes with age. I wonder what he looked like, the old king wonders, staring into space as if he could somehow conjure up a memory, a ghost of the son he cast away. I wonder how he died.

Neither of them remember what—who—he died for.

The spirits, restless and churning. Their features are in sharper definition now, their shapes clearer, their eyes tell-tale signs of who they are, who they were or could have been: this one dreams of his childhood sweetheart, that one of her eldest sister. This one remembers his own funeral, that one sees his family going on without him, and wishes he had more time to burn with the living. Gray and sad and waiting, all of them, dreaming of the afterlives that could have been theirs, had they chosen a different path.

Achilles agrees to fight again, but his eyes are empty and his hair is matted and he doesn't seem to hear what he's saying. Hektor, he whispers. Hektor. Hektor will pay for this . . . .

He is only a spirit, but he wants to scream, cry out, knock the spear out of Achilles' hands: _he can't pay. He has nothing to give, nothing left that has not been taken. He was defending Troy, Achilles, was he the one who refused to save the Myrmidons?_

_ Only you can pay for what has been done to me._

Above, Achilles starts, reaches out, crying his dead friend's name. The ghost disappears as quickly as it had come, but the voice rings in his ears: _Was he the one who refused to save the Myrmidons? Only you can pay, only you . . . ._

The hero falls asleep again, but it is a restless, uneasy sleep, and in the morning he takes the armor the gods have wrought him and sets out for Hektor's blood.

_He can't pay_, says the ghost. _He has nothing to give that has not been taken._

But even in death there is nothing he can do to change Achilles' mind.

We all reach a crossroads, someone says, into the grayness. Some take Elysium, and fame, and greatness. We chose this.

_This?_

We might have been heroes. We might have been villains. Certainly we could all go both ways.

_ He chose Elysium. He chose Elysium, but I was a hero too, in my own way._

But we held to our shadows. We will never be seen as who we are—who we could have been. The judges can tell, you know.

_What do they know?_

They know us. They know who we wanted to be, not who we became.

Drifting. Waiting. Unremembered grayness, the toy soldiers who played their masters' game, and played it well . . . Hektor's spear shattering his breastbone, Achilles screaming, rubbing his face in the dust, Hektor chased around and around the walls of Troy. And, finally, Paris' fatal arrow, guided by some malicious child, strikes Achilles in the heel.

Weakness.

Weakness, and he falls.

Achilles, on his way to Elysium, golden and glittering as he was when Patroklos first met him, generations ago. He passes through the Fields of Asphodel, and Patroklos reaches out to him, opens his mouth to speak, to hear his voice . . . .

But then he pulls his hand back, thinking better of it. Their choices have been made already. There is no going back.


End file.
